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Tuesday, 1 March 2011

Chocolate chip & oat cookies

When I first met my husband, he used to go on about cookies called "oat crunchies" that his mother used to make. I got the recipe from her and tried it a few times but it was always "they're not quite right". It took me a long time to realise where I was going wrong. I was using butter, but his mum (like everyone else, back in the 1980s) used to use a baking margarine. It seems that people who were raised on margarine tend to prefer the taste of it. Weirdos...

(the shame)

Another time I'll share the recipe for oat crunchies, which are actually very nice even if you do break with tradition and use butter, but today I've got a recipe for the oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies I made yesterday. They should be made with butter, but since they were intended for my husband's junk food drawer at work I made them with horrible cheap baking margarine instead and he loved them. There is just no accounting for taste, is there?

Preheat the oven to 175ºC.Cream the butter and sugars together with a wooden spoon or in an electric mixer with a paddle attachment. Add the egg, milk and vanilla while still beating. Don't worry if the mixture looks a bit curdled.

Reduce the speed if you're using an electric mixer, and add the flour, baking powder, oats and chocolate.Roll the dough into balls the size of walnuts and place on two baking trays, well spaced out as they'll spread a bit. No need to grease the tray. You should get about 30 balls (I got 29).

Bake for 15-20 minutes till they've started to colour - they will still be soft when they come out of the oven but will quickly firm up so they are crispy round the edges but still a bit soft and chewy in the middle. Let them sit on the trays for a minute before removing and cooling on a wire rack.Recipe adapted a bit from Rachel Allen's Bake, which is a gorgeous book and one I use a lot.

5 comments:

Oh, these cookies look lovely! Can't go wrong with chocolate chips. Isn't it odd to think that just a couple of decades ago everyone used margarine like crazy, and we were all told it was "better" for us than butter? (Not that butter is good for us, but you know what I mean!) I made oat crunchies this past fall, by the way, and liked them, using an old recipe from Gourmet magazine. I sandwiched them with raspberry jam. Yummy. Your blog, by the way, is delightful! So glad to have found it. :)

Those look and sound delicious - even with the margarine! My mother was probably the only person in the US who didn't buy into the "margarine is healthier" mania of the 1980s, so I never ate it growing up. But sometimes it makes a nice, chewy cookie.

I guess that's how it was back in the 80's. My mother-in-law to this day still uses margarine. As for me, I couldn't think of anything worse. For me it's butter or it's nothing. The same goes for vanilla extract. Expensive as hell, but too bad. I won't use another substitute.

Just a tip from me - next time reduce the caster sugar by half and make up the other half with raw sugar. Don't overmix. I find the granules help to make the bikkies even crunchier. At least that's what I do.

I just came from Fig Jam and Lime Cordial and noticed you said you made heaps of jam last year. I'm a jam nutter, so I'd be very keen to see your recipes.

Cor these look good! My boys would def be interested in me knocking out some of these... in fact they'd probably like to get stuck in and 'help' me - zoinks!My mum swears by using marg in baking... i'm more of a butter fan myself coz of the taste.